“For the next twelve months, George has given M and I free rein to reimagine the garden using radical and regenerative gardening practices. We don’t want to compromise its wilderness and apparent spontaneity, and dream of a day when front gardens everywhere are wilder, biodiverse, nature-friendly.” (From my previous post Goodbye, old friend.)
Here’s another garden in the village, Poppy’s Garden, and M and I are the custodians of this one. It’s about half the size of a tennis court except, rather than being rectangular, it’s a skew-whiff square, like you might draw with your eyes closed. A mixed hedgerow bounds two sides of the garden, with the remaining boundaries fenced. Over the hedgerow and cottage rooftops below, there’s a view across the firth to Scotland.
Over the years, as crofts and infields in the village exchanged hands and got divided, a warren of higgledy-piggledy routes emerged to reach some of them. A garden directly behind a house, then, might belong to next door but one. To reach Poppy’s garden, I’ve to walk up a lane, past the derelict farmhouse, its render scraped by agricultural plant.1 After passing the farmhouse and the stone wall with the snowberry and iron bed head, I reach a wee crossroads. I turn left, walk up the even narrower and sunken lane. There’s a green bank on my right, rising three metres to a pasture with the prosaic name Croft Field. But Poppy’s garden is up the bank on my left.
The essence of this garden, the sense of place. It was part of a smallholding at one time. James grew vegetables and strawberries up here, and this is where he homed doves, built a greenhouse, tinkered in the shed. Earlier still, folk used some of the site as a midden. M and I uncovered a circular pit with layers of bottles and ceramics. A basin for suet pudding, wells for ink, medicine and cure bottles for humans and horses, one thousand sherds of china. Is all of this why Poppy’s garden feels, as people have remarked, like an allotment? And yet, it was little more than boundaries and rye grass when M and I first set to work on it. What do you see when you think of an allotment? I see a miscellany of make and mend. Patched up sheds, corrugated water butts, Heath Robinson contraptions for sweet peas…
From time to time, M comes home from work with a miscellaneous assortment of objects that his customers don’t want. The yard where he stores everything fills up, spills into Poppy’s garden. After a day at work, especially after a day at work in the dark, damp Cumbrian winter months, M doesn’t always feel inclined to dejunk and tidy up as he goes along. I’ll walk up to the garden and find a pile of gravel, sods of grass, a metal washing line pole embedded in a craggy lump of concrete. A wooden pallet, a parasol, one dozen two by two concrete slabs. Reader, there have been marital arguments. Mostly, though, I’ve no objections to the detritus. Better here than in landfill and, anyway, M and I are used to repurposing this and that.
Poppy’s garden, an old school British Bohemian. Wild and cultivated. A garden that isn’t for the fainthearted. Let’s say Francis Bacon, as opposed to John Constable.
In his essay, MS is meticulously destroying me. I am being unmade2 Paraic O’Donnell writes: “To care for a garden, you have to know it deeply. You have to know it carnally. You have to touch it intimately, get under its skin. You have to go down on it, taste its undermurk, get as filthy as it wants, let it claw you, mark you, draw blood. You have to ache from it, stink of it, reel from it.”
I’ve left Poppy’s garden alone for three years. Three years. No human intervention.
“Are you rewilding?” asked a near neighbour, making an air quote.
“Biding time, thinking about what’s next, is all.”
“You could build a decent garage up here,” he said.
I’m in Poppy’s garden this morning, besieged by misty-eyed memories. This garden was rambling and climbing roses through trees, long grass, creeping buttercup and greater celandine. It was yellow archangel and bluebells, foxgloves, a black elder and a yellow peony, Molly the Witch3. There were ‘no dig’ beds bounded by hazel rods, in which I grew beans, beetroot, garlic, good King Henry, marigolds for saffron, peas, potatoes… We gathered young hawthorn leaves from the hedgerow, made a roulade. There was, still is, fruit aplenty: Poppy’s garden is an orphanage for unwanted fruit trees M rescues. Then there’s the plum Ez gifted me on Mother’s Day years ago.
There’s the apple tree Poppy chewed to two feet when we weren’t looking. M and I have hosted art exhibitions, pizza oven sessions and barbecues up here. We’ve camped out, giggling like kids. It trips me out, this garden. I’ve watched the trees blowing in the wind, or shadows on the grass like ink blots, and seen an artwork that’s something like an M. C. Escher litho. Another time, a painting by Pablo Amaringo.
There’s realism too. I came up here last year to attempt an hour’s pruning, but over by the fence is where I couldn’t help but shit myself, the side effects of a hospital operation. And there’s the beech hedge from which a sparrowhawk flew with a screaming blackbird in its talons, legs flailing. Here’s the low, dry stone wall I made. I wouldn’t have the strength to build it now.
That wall would impress my Mum.
It seems to me now that, at nine or ten, I was always looking for my mother. Where was she? I wanted to ask her this or that, show her my drawing, tell her I didn’t want to go to the party across the road. Why couldn’t I just stay at home? And then I’d find her, she’d snap, I’d recoil, run away.
Later, Mum would come and find me. She wouldn’t ever put her arms around me, say “sorry I snapped,” or tell me she loved me. But I knew she loved me. I knew she was apologising in her own way. We’d bake bread or make a trifle. Sometimes, she’d take me to the cinema, just the two of us. The Day of the Dolphin4, The Slipper and the Rose.5
My autism diagnosis in adulthood triggered memories of my mother. I remembered how, if stressed, she would twitch her face and shiver. She’d go through a series of convulsive movements, as if shaking off something abhorrent no one but Mum could see. Much later, when I was a new mother, Mum told me she nearly died from diphtheria when a child.
“That’s why,” she’d said, “I have these whatever they are. These spasms. I don’t remember having them before I contracted diphtheria.”
But when I was a child, I overheard my father and others saying my mother had “bad nerves,” that she was going through a “nervous breakdown.” And the older I got, the more I heard people say the same about me: I’d “bad nerves,” I was “super shy and difficult.” I jumped and cried when people startled me. I ran away from loud noises, or covered my ears. Then there were what my parents might have called tantrums, my reaction to what I now understand as sensory overload. Just as I thought, back then, that I’d inherited Mum’s “bad nerves,” I worried I’d start twitching and shivering, too.
We'll never know if my mother had Sydenham's Chorea, as someone once suggested. Thinking back, though, I wonder if Mum had autism; I wonder if she was stimming? That her twitches and shivers were her way of coping.
I stim by stroking Alfie and talking to him. Or I stim by just being close to him if he’s not up for a chat.
Not now, I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. You were snoring.
So were you.
I stim by being in a garden, too. A particular kind of being in a garden, looking for sherds of blue and white in the earth, endlessly fascinated by the treasure I discover. Or sitting by, and watching, the pond. Or, to paraphrase
just standing and staring.6 There’s a lot to be said for that.In one month or two, Poppy’s garden will be waist high in nettles and apple mint. It needs my attention and I’ve an idea. I've had three years to think about it. It’s going to work.
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The gouges make me think of a passage in Philip Hoare’s seminal book Leviathan: “giant squid, mythical enemy of the sperm whale.” Hoare, P. (2009) (p. 33) Leviathan or, The Whale. Paperback edition. London: Fourth Estate.
“In this moving essay, the writer charts his disease’s progression against the seasons.” Online at <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/paraic-o-donnell-ms-is-meticulously-destroying-me-i-am-being-unmade-1.4168380>; accessed Tuesday 01 February 2024.
“Grows wild in the centre of the Caucasus, a plant of exceptional beauty. In early spring the buds and young leaves are a rich pinkish-bronze. As they turn to soft grey-green the buds gradually open to full beauty, perfect bowls of cool lemon-yellow, filled with golden stamens in late spring.” Online at <https://www.bethchatto.co.uk/conditions/plants-for-shade-conditions/paeonia-mlokosewitschii.htm>; accessed Tuesday 06 February 2024.
The Day of the Dolphin. “A marine biologist teaches his dolphins to communicate in English but shady characters plan to kidnap the trained mammals for a more sinister purpose.” Online at <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069946/>; accessed Tuesday 06 February 2024.
The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella “is a 1976 British musical retelling the classic fairy tale of Cinderella.” Online at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slipper_and_the_Rose>; accessed Tuesday 06 February 2024.
“Reconnect with nature from the ground up and nurture not only your garden but your soul. There's a lot of gardening advice out there. But none that invites you to think about how to be while you're in your garden. With increasingly busy lives, yet another list of chores seems like the last thing we need when it comes to our own practice of self-care and relaxation.” Andrew Timothy O’Brien’s contemplative, brilliant book can be found here at bookshop.org:
Beautiful